Author: J.S. Rajput
Publication: Hindustan Times
Date: March 10, 2004
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_608645,00120002.htm
The inventors of the controversy
over the 'communalisation' of Indian history are at it again. Since the
early Seventies, they've been campaigning against historians who disagreed
with the Leftist-Marxist view of India's past, which, thanks to official
patronage, became the dominant school of historiography.
From the tenor and content of Romila
Thapar's articles, Future of Indian past and One nation's many pasts (March
1, 2), it's clear that she wishes society to remain ideologically anchored
to one of the most forgettable chapters in the history of Indian scholarship.
Since few students pursue history
at a higher level, school history is about all that most educated Indians
are ever exposed to. Across the world, school-level textbook writing is
left to professionals. But the scheme of our 'eminent historians' was not
entirely didactic; it was about 'mind control'.
Even today, many Indians believe
that the Aryans were a foreign community of settlers in India, or that
Guru Tegh Bahadur was nothing more than a brigand who got his 'execution'
orders from the 'Moghal administration'. Aurangzeb, the 'zinda pir', was
nowhere in the picture in this sordid act. To them, India was a backward
civilisation, a fragmented nation moving from the control of one invading
party to another.
The publication of the new NCERT
books was opposed by these historians. In fact, the first slogans against
the 'saffronisation of history' began long before the first new book was
even commissioned. Under the banner of the Indian History Congress, they
published a compendium of perceived 'errors'. When the NCERT's authors
began to go over the allegations, they discovered that under the garb of
presenting a 'secular, scientific and liberal' history, the historians
had presented generations of school-goers with textbooks that were long
on rhetoric and short on facts. As Irfan Habib, the prime mover of the
IHC project to defame the NCERT, acknowledged, much of what Thapar wrote
in the old Class VI textbook was far from the truth.
Habib castigated the new NCERT author,
Makkhan Lal, for "parivar writings" for suggesting that Asoka's emphasis
on building a moral and welfare-oriented State had adverse implications
on Mauryan India's security outlook. But that amounted to belittling Thapar's
Asoka and the decline of the Mauryas because this famous work formed the
basis of Lal's approach to the specific context. Elsewhere, Habib dismissed
an observation on the art of growing silk and making paper in the 5th century
AD. He claimed that these articles of daily life entered India via the
Muslims (sic). But hadn't Thapar written much the same in Early India?
Till 1999, Thapar was telling her 12-year-old readers that the Aryans may
have come from Central Asia or Europe. Not once did she mention the existence
of a group of scholars who believed the Aryans had their home in India.
Moreover, this was in contrast to
the position she herself had been taking in her more serious works for
at least 15 years now. Is it not strange that a scholar who insists that
history cannot be rewritten (on the basis of new facts, as the NCERT has
steadfastly maintained), should abandon her old fundamental approach to
the Aryan question? She rightly acknowledges the flaws in the old theory
that the word 'Aryan' represented an ethnic group and emphasises now that
it could have meant a family of languages. But when these omissions are
juxtaposed with the general tendency of Marxists to downplay the scientific
and philosophical breakthroughs achieved in ancient India, one begins to
wonder if the allegations about the eminent historians' 'hidden agenda'
were right after all.
Also, their insistence on foregrounding
the story of medieval India with the (mostly fabricated) salutary effects
of foreign invasion was controversial. Why was it supposed that Muslim
Indians would take offence at instances of iconoclasm or persecution of
non-believers by dynasties of foreign origin which ruled in Delhi and other
provinces for centuries before British domination? Does linking Muslim
Indians to foreign marauders not constitute an insult to their patriotism?
If the 'secularism' token is advanced, should it not extend to Christian
Indians too (after all Clive and Curzon were Christians) and a basic overhaul
be ordered into independent India's analysis of British rule?
In totalitarian societies (Nazi
Germany, Soviet Russia), books on history were banned if they questioned
the official line. But linking the present Indian experience with those
dark traditions is a figment of the imagination. Today, Thapar accuses
the NCERT of not bothering to put its new books through committees. Not
only is that untrue, but she unwittingly admits that earlier regimes tolerated
only the presence of like-minded sycophants .
If anything, the NCERT has thrown
open Indian history to scholars of all ideological hues. Independent scholars
are breathing easier and the selection to major positions is no longer
the prerogative of a select few. It is only through a free exchange of
ideas that scholars can arrive at a consensual identification of facts
and analyses. This would enable educationists to develop a new generation
which is at once imbibed with the values of its ancient heritage as well
as equipped with the faculties and commitment to face the realities of
the age they live in.
(The writer is Director, NCERT)
